I first got a PlayStation (1) when I was about 9 years old, and we got Road Rash 3D with it. Looking back the graphics were pretty shocking (though cutting edge at the time). But my main memory is how liberating it felt to leave the race route and just ride around aimlessly for hours and hours, exploring the countryside and the towns and cities you'd discover. I got a lot more out of that than trying to keep up with the race. Now I think I might try RDR2 some time if it offers a bit of that buzz again.
This is similar to what I remember from playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. I wasn't very good at the actual game, but there was a post-credit sequence I would skip to where you could just walk, drive, and fly around quiet, rural, and sparsely islands. The simulation is pretty unremarkable by todays standards but being able to explore a huge open world at my own pace was incredible at the time.
One encounter that stands out in my memory was of driving along a remote road in the middle of the night and coming across a bad traffic collision where a truck had completely crushed a small car along with its driver. Something about the brutal and almost mundane nature of the encounter has stuck with me.
For you and the GP I would recommend picking up Horizon Zero Dawn. The environments are gorgeous and vast, with lots of "story" in the placing of props and such. The actual story of that game was prettt darn good too, but if all you want to do is roam around a beautiful landscape – and occasionally come upon murderous robots, but they can typically be avoided rather easily – it will certainly hit the spot.
Gosh, I wish that game had been popular enough to fund continued development. (Last time I checked in on it, it looked like it had stalled out.) I remember following the developer on Twitter and they had SO MANY good ideas. I bought the game and found it very fun, but:
- It felt like a 1.0, and really made me want a 2.0
- The difficulty ramped way too quickly. It started out as "Sir, you are being hunted.", but every time I played, after about 15 minutes, it seemed to ramp up to "SIR, YOU ARE BEING HUNTED!!!!!"
- Imagine the multiplayer possibilities. Like, if there were different teams being hunted. Some players are on your team, and some are your adversaries. Like imagine PUBG in this universe, but instead of a plasma wall closing in, there are ever increasing numbers of hunter robots spawning near the edge of a dwindling circle.
Reminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead Redemption:
"What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse."
Rockstar should consider breaking their games down into sub games. They could build a G rated game about caring for wild horses and sell it for kids; they'd only have to remove content. In the full RDR2 game my daughter might have fun caring for horses, but she might also witness a random murder, pick up new words I'd rather her not repeat, witness a rape, who knows. I haven't actually played RDR2 but all of those thing seem like possibilities in a Rockstar game.
Heck, all they'd have to do is release the toolkit à la Bethesda. Allowing players to mod the game is the best thing that shop ever did. Skyrim has an avid following with player-made mods still trickling out to this day, and it was released 7-8 years ago.
Exactly! The taxi, ambulance, and firetruck missions were some of my favorite parts of the GTA games, and featured relatively nonviolent, legal activities. They could easily be standalone games... One could argue the taxi missions already are, if you count Crazy Taxi.
War Zone Taxi Driver (GTA: San Andreas with cheat codes "everyone has guns" and "everyone's hostile to everyone" applied, and me in a taxi running missions) is a really, really good game. I'd absolutely buy and play a whole game of just variations on that.
In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier, I think he was also quoted as saying his daughter's insatiable habit of repeatedly mounting and unmounting the horse caused a serious bug, which they would not have found otherwise.
See Euro Truck Simulator. These kinds of simulation games have a pretty decent niche community, though I'm not sure they actually constitute a decently sized market. They're really relaxing though, in the right vein.
But it's still a balance between reality and the interesting subset of it; having to manually brush your horse with a mouse would be awful, while requiring that you take your horse to a stable every night would be fine.
The main issue is that to design a decent simulator like that though, you have to avoid basically 90% of modern gaming trends. Fast travel, mechanically-intense play, grinding missions, small-but-numerous subquests, etc are exactly what a modern (A)RPG pushes for, and are exactly how you ruin a game like euro truck simulator. It's the mundanity, scheduling and (some) repetition that makes the game satisfying.
Im not imagining it as unpleasant to do, but rather totally unsatisfying, and if made an important part of maintainence, a really big nuisance. Either it’d very quickly boil down to scrubbing really fast, or just a monotous drudgery.
Ofc, if the game was primarily about taking care of your horse rather than maintanence for riding your horse, it might be fine. But my tastes definitely tend towards the latter.
This is one of those difficult problems where I have a lot of respect for game designers. What's least unsatisfying?
1. Leaving it out altogether
2. A "brush horse" button that you click and that's the end of it
3. Making the player do it with the mouse
In American Truck Simulator you don't have to clean your truck, but you do have to get gas. Since a horse's cleanliness is more vital, maybe a cleaning mechanic (or at least a button/corresponding animation) should be in the game. Then you have to address the timing, which environmental/time factors, etc. would cause the horse to get dirty, if taking the horse into a lake will rinse it off (wait can our horses swim? Need to check with the dev team). I think I'd have a hard time designing a simulator that would actually be fun. So many trade-offs to consider.
I would say its not actually that difficult, its just constrained by whatever you're trying to accomplish. eg truck simulators dont have you cleaning, because its not part of the mental model of driving. But gas is a very necessary part of it.
Horse cleaning is important for maintenance, but a non-thought in travel. Thus a horse maintenance game would have brushing mechanics and it would be sensible, while it'd be a nuisance in a game emphasizing travel (even slow travel; feeding/housing your horse would be much more appropriate). But the key I think is to realize what the effect you're having on gameplay is pacing, and the mechanic of brushing or feeding or whatever is just an aesthetic/reason around it. So you'd only simulate so far as to render the pace of the game correct, and no more. So you might have feeding or cleaning, but probably not both in a travel game (it'd slow things down too much, and probably be part of the same operation anyways). A maintenance sim would prefer much slower pacing than even a slow travel game would
I loved the outdoor simulator aspect of RDR2. It might be my favorite part of the game. But I would get bored of it very quickly if it was the only thing I could do. Hunting and fishing and scouting were fun because they gave me a break from grinding missions, and it let me customize my character. But I wanted a customized character for when I was playing missions and working the story.
So the hunting and fishing and birding is fun because the rest of the game contextualizes it.
There's definitely survival games in this vein that have done quite well, The Long Dark is probably one of the better ones. Quite playable before they even had the story for this kind of thing.